How to Identify Marketing Automation Quick Wins and Major Pain Points

When setting up your marketing automation tool, start by focusing on quick wins. Quick wins are the first three or more efficiency gains that will return the largest benefits soonest after implementing your solution. By focusing on quick wins, your implementation will gain the most efficiency in the shortest amount of time.

The following list of quick wins contains the most common marketing activities that can be made more efficient through automation:

Lead qualification

Lead scoring

List management

List cleaning

Lead assignment

Return on investment (ROI) reporting

Lead nurturing

In addition to the aforementioned quick wins of marketing automation, there are also many benefits of automation to look forward to and to include in your initial implementation.

After identifying your most compelling quick wins, you should define your largest business efficiency frustrations, using the following list as a guide. A company without marketing automation is likely to experience at least one of the following four major weaknesses, or pain points:

Lack of IT efficiency: You experience inefficiency when creating, executing, reporting on, and managing online campaigns due to limited technical knowledge. Or, you may be beholden to your IT department for your HTML needs, website updates, or connecting data between tools because you can’t execute these efforts without IT support.

Disconnected marketing tools: Manual efforts, such as data exporting or manual reporting, are frustrating due to the lack of connectivity between your marketing tools, and you find yourself often using spreadsheets to keep track of prospect interactions across tools.

Cumbersome lead generation: You experience a lack of efficiency when managing, tracking, and increasing your lead flow with the same budget.

Lack of alignment between marketing and sales: Your marketing and sales departments spend time and energy arguing over lead quality, lead flow, lead assignment, or campaign reporting.

Identifying quick wins and major pain points are the fastest ways to realize the value of your marketing automation tool and will provide you with a solid foundation for future expansion of that tool. As you evaluate marketing automation and prove its value over time, many aspects of it will provide you with continuous value.